DESCRIPTION (provided by appicant): Automatic uses of memory are pervasive in daily life and provide us the foundations and the freedom for high-level cognitive activities. Accordingly, understanding the nature of these processes is vital both for the scientific understanding of memory and for applications of that knowledge. Yet, there is some debate about the relationship between two automatic uses of memory: perceptual implicit memory (PIM) and explicit familiarity. The proposed research is designed to investigate this relationship by testing two opposing hypotheses: 1) Familiarity and PIM are similar processes that share the same underlying mechanisms. 2) These are distinct forms of memory that do not share common underlying components. The proposed research strategy is to vary the conditions of both recognition and PIM tests such that both tests engage perceptual processes to the same degree. Four experiments are proposed to test these hypotheses by seeking converging evidence across different methods of measuring familiarity and PIM.